How Are U.S. Warships Supporting Israel’s Genocide In Gaza?

Gaza has been under military blockade since 2006. Its one harbor, in Gaza City, was heavily bombed by Israel recently. Repeated attempts to reach Gaza with boats carrying humanitarian supplies have been thwarted by Israel with U.S. backing and we’ve seen activists beaten and even killed for trying to deliver cargo like medical supplies.

Bringing this question closer to home, How is the genocide in Gaza supported by General Dynamics and Bath Iron Works?

General Dynamics is the world’s fourth largest weapons manufacturer and Bath Iron Works (BIW) is one of its many locations for building weapon delivery systems. In this location in Maine shipbuilders historically profited from building slave ships.

Today, both destroyers and cruisers are built to be nuclear-capable meaning they are designed to be able to deliver first-strike attack nuclear Tomahawk cruise missiles and SM-3 ‘missile defense’ interceptors which would take out an enemy’s defenses following a first strike by the U.S.

Currently there are multiple Bath-built warships in the vicinity of Gaza including the eastern Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, and the Gulf of Aden. The USS Kearny, an Aegis destroyer built at BIW, is deployed there as is the USS Mason, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer which on 27 November engaged in a firefight with Yemeni forces on behalf of an Israeli merchant ship it was sent to rescue. U.S. ships have been reported as routinely shooting down drones launched from Yemen that target ships in the vicinity.

Map dated May, 2020 Source: https://iranpress.com/infographic-military-assets-in-eastern-mediterranean

On 15 November Aljazeera published a video report, “What does the Western naval build-up in the Middle East look like?” with this comment: “The Middle East is witnessing a Western naval build-up that hasn’t been seen there for decades: aircraft carriers, destroyers, missile cruisers, amphibious assault ships, a nuclear-powered submarine, and many more.”

U.S. warships are deployed to deter resistance forces in the region — such as Hezbollah — from intervening to stop genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. So far they’ve been apparently unsuccessful, however, their presence increases the likelihood of escalation as in the case of the USS Mason fighting Yemen on behalf of Israel.

Since the resumption of Israel’s bombing of Gaza on December 1, these confrontations have indeed escalated.

Treating U.S. warships as inherently different from Israeli warships is mythology. The two nation states have never been in closer lock step as they do the bidding of their corporate overlords.

Israel has been described as “America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier” but the U.S. and Israel have never been so reviled in world opinion as they are today. Their collective reputation is sinking like a warship that’s taking on water.

Join us in Bath this Friday if you’re able. Help us communicate to workers that we know Bath Iron Works only has one customer — the U.S. Navy — but it wasn’t always like that. So many useful things could be built there and even more good union jobs generated, like hospital ships to provide relief for the bombed out children of Gaza.

Injured Palestinian kid receives medical treatment at Al-Nasr Children’s Hospital after an Israeli attack in Khan Yunis, Gaza on November 18, 2023. Abed Zagout/Anadolu via Getty Images

If you have the courage, watch or read: “A harrowing video shows decomposing babies in a Gaza hospital after they had to be abandoned amid Israeli attacks.”

Then, wherever you’re located, get out in the streets to demand an end to genocide in Gaza and to the military blockade that supports it.

Corporations Mad For War While People Suffer Deprivation

Photo of United Nations in session.
Can the United Nations prevent another world war as it was created to do? Stay tuned. Photo: UN

Readers of this blog may recall that I once had a child born on Pearl Harbor Day in Tokyo, where I lived at the time. My Japanese friends did not know the Pearl Harbor Day reference. 

Me: You know, that was when the U.S. entered WW2 after Japan bombed their military site in Hawai’i. 

Them: Hmm, I may have heard something about that. (Note that they had all graduated from university in Japan.) 

Me: What day do Japanese people remember as significant in WW2?

Them: Hiroshima (duh).

Archival photo of Hiroshima devastation following atomic bomb dropped by U.S. in 1945.
Hiroshima after the U.S. dropped a nuclear bomb in 1945. Source: nationalww2museum.org

Then I often asked a follow up question because I was truly curious. Why did Japan enter into a war where pilots were sent on suicide missions in planes built without landing gear in order to save dwindling resources?

The Japanese people did not want war, my Tokyo friends said. People were starving, they said. It was the zaibatsu that pursued conquest and war. 

Zaibatsu, (literally “financial clique”), were vertically integrated business conglomerates in the  Japanese empire with both industrial and financial branches.

Why do I bring this up now?

As we teeter on the brink of WW3, the zaibatsu of the U.S. empire push for war while controlling finance, media, social media, and what’s left of our industrial base building weapons of mass destruction.

Their control of information streams is devastating as Democratic Party-aligned liberals and Republic Party-aligned conservatives alike cheerlead for sending billions in weapons and cash to Ukraine.

It is nearly impossible to find a glimmer of truth about extremely significant news of the contemporary slouch toward war.

The Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines were sabotaged by underwater explosives last week, and the corporate press in the U.S. and Europe blamed..Russia?

Map with headline "Mystery leaks reported from Nord Stream gas pipelines" and 3 of the leaks pinpointed along the route of the piplines.

This is despite several facts on the ground such as: Victoria Nuland threatened the pipelines, Joe Biden threatened the pipelines, while Russia, an investor in the pipelines, could at any point simply turn off gas on their end. Reported Dave DeCamp in antiwar.com:

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday that the attacks on the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines that connect Russia to Germany offer a “tremendous opportunity” to end Europe’s dependency on Russian energy.

Now Russian gas is bubbling up in the Baltic Sea, worthless, right in the spots where NATO conducted undersea war exercises last month.

Surface of Baltic Sea with wide circle of gas bubbles visible.
Gas leak at Nord Stream 2 as seen from the Danish F-16 interceptor on Bornholm, Denmark September 27, 2022. Danish Defence Command/Forsvaret Ritzau Scanpix/via REUTERS

But reporting that addresses the cui bono (who benefits?) is censored

(The practice run over Covid-19 information supression was awfully well-timed, was it not?)

Then there are the referenda in four eastern oblasts of Ukraine, which showed overwhelmingly (90%+) that people there want to join the Russian Federation.

In the corporate press the approved doublespeak for these votes is “sham.” (It is telling when you encounter the very same adjectives over and over in numerous corporate-owned media outlets.)

The reports that claim the voting in every location was faked never bother to mention that two of the oblasts have been shelled by Ukraine for the past 8 years, resulting in 14,000 deaths, most of them Russian-speaking civilians. Russia intervened by attacking Ukraine’s military which is waging war by proxy on behalf of NATO nations.

Why do I believe the voting was authentic? Because I follow several independent journalists who went there, observed the polls, interviewed people on the street, and reported on it. Eva Bartlett and Vanessa Beeley were both informative sources.

The UN Security Council failed to declare the referenda “illegal” when put to a vote last week.

Meanwhile, the wheels are coming off the kamikaze airplanes. 

The British pound and the euro are struggling along with their populations who face high rates of inflation, in many cases hunger, and a very cold winter ahead due to sanctions blocking Russian fuels they depended on. And even if they change their minds about the sanctions, the pipelines are defunct and will require months of repairs to be functional.

As if conditions weren’t bad enough, the military-industrial-congressional-media complex is simultaneously gearing up to confront China, because that’s the end game. 

Taking Russia out first, as a key ally to China, is the plan for world domination.

Screenshot of a Telegram post by @intelRepublic: BREAKING NEWS US, Jpan, and South Korea to begin joint anti-submarine warfare exercises tomorrow near Korean Peninsula for first time in 5 years, with aircraft carrier (depicted) to participate.

Yesterday, North Korea conducted test launch of 2 ballistic missiles from North Korean territory.

What day do you think your children will remember if they survive WW3?